Vista Parental Controls

If you go with the Business Edition of Vista you gain quite a bit of functionality, but you do lose some features too. One such feature is parental controls, I was investigating this feature for my own daughter who is getting interested in the Internet and decided to give this a closer look. Here is what I found…

You’ll need to create another account before you can play with these options as you cannot enforce parental controls on the default administrator account with which you are most likely logged in. You can create an account right from the Parental Controls applet if you don’t have one set up already.

To access Parental Controls, go to the Control Panel and click “Set up parental controls for any user” under “User Accounts and Family Safety” in the new Control Panel Home view (which by the way is a great improvement in layout and organization once you get used to it). UAP will want your permission to continue, and once you answer “continue”, you will see the options for Parental Controls which include...

Web restrictions – You can allow all websites, or specify a list of those to be blocked or allowed. The example to show the URL format you are to use when entering a website shows: http://www.contoso.com (which was disappointingly just a redirect to the Microsoft home page). There is an import and export feature here and I’m sure there will be plenty of supported lists to download from the web that may be used as a good starting point (or for some a list of websites to check out). There is a content filtering technology as well so that you can choose restriction levels and content categories to automatically block content. In my case, I set the restriction level to high which is described in the help as follows: “Children's sites include content that is understandable and usable by children, and that is appropriate for them. The language of a children's site is typically aimed at 8 to 12 year-olds, and the concepts presented are accessible to younger minds. When you choose this level, you permit your child to see children's sites, as well as any website that you add to the list of allowed websites.”

Time limits – a simple time grid is provided where you may click and drag to color the hours you wish to block use of the computer. This allows you to specify hours for any or all days of the week and is very straight-forward.

Games – you can decide if games may be played at all and, if yes, you can set game ratings and may even block or allow games by name. When specifying specific games, you are presented with a list of games to choose from with the options: User Rating Setting, Always Allow or Always Bock. When choosing ratings each rating is described and you can also specify if you wish to allow unrated to be played. Unrated games can still be blocked based on the type of content it contains and there is an extensive list you may check off to restrict games that contain. A sampling of these content options includes, Animated Blood, Cartoon Violence, Crude Humor, Nudity, Sexual Violence, Strong Lyrics, etc. (with descriptions of each term to help you choose). Note: This feature requires an NTFS partition.

Allow or block specific programs – You can choose to allow the use of all programs, or if you specify that they may only use the programs you allow, a list of executables found on your system are listed (along with the description and product name properties for the files) for you to select.

You may even generate activity reports based on computer usage. Reports include Websites Visited, Web Overrides, File Downloads, Games Played, Instant messaging, media played and quite a bit more. I find the whole feature very simple to configure and comprehensive enough to really be a helpful tool.